Panthers-Bruins will be a historic first-round series for the NHL playoffs. Here’s why
The Florida Panthers were the best team in the regular season a year ago. The Boston Bruins were maybe the best regular-season team ever this year. When they meet in the first round of the 2023 Stanley Cup playoffs next week, they’re going to make history.
For the first time ever, the last two Presidents’ Trophy winners will square off in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Less than a year after they were the biggest favorite in Round 1 of the 2022 Stanley Cup playoffs, the Panthers will probably be the biggest underdog in the opening round this year, but they know this will be no typical first-round series.
“Hell yeah, we’re excited,” left wing Ryan Lomberg said Thursday. “Everybody in this room has confidence that we can beat anybody in the league.”
There’s reason to believe in Florida, even though the Bruins set an NHL single-season record for wins this year and finished 47 points ahead of the Panthers.
Florida won the Presidents’ Trophy less than a year ago, when it put together the highest-scoring season in a quarter of century to run through the Eastern Conference. The Panthers then followed up their trophy-winning regular season by advancing in the Cup playoffs for the first time since 1996. Although it spent most of the season on the outside of the postseason picture, Florida (42-32-8) has the fourth-best record in the East since the start of March while leading the conference with 3.8 goals per game. For more than a month, the Panthers have played more like the team they were last season, when they were a true Stanley Cup contender, than this year.
They also split the season series with Boston, beat the Bruins in overtime in the most recent meeting back in January and are one of only four teams with multiple forwards averaging more than a point per game and a defenseman with at least 73 points — even Boston doesn’t hit either qualifier.
The Bruins are much better than they are — even they won’t deny it — and Florida does enter the playoffs on a two-game losing streak after falling 6-4 to the Carolina Hurricanes in the regular-season finale Thursday in Sunrise, but the gulf, the Panthers believe, is not as wide as the gap in the standings suggests.
“We’re not just happy getting in the playoffs here,” All-Star right wing Matthew Tkachuk said Thursday. “We believe that we have a good enough team that you never know what can happen in these situations here.”
The NHL playoffs are historically much more amenable to massive first-round upsets — and even deep runs by teams after just barely sneaking into the postseason. Although the NHL no longer seeds teams No. 1-8 in each conference, Boston is the East’s top seed and Florida, as the second and final wild card in the conference, is effectively the No. 8 seed. Teams in the the Panthers’ position have pulled off first-round upsets 19 times. Even Presidents’ Trophy winners have lost in the first round seven times in the award’s 37-year history and one of the teams to spring one of those upsets—the Kings in 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs—went on to win the championship.
Is it unlikely Florida will pull of a first round upset? Of course. It’s just not impossible.
“It is so hard to get into the playoffs. The 16 teams left all have enough talent to win and then it’s going to be grinding, goaltending and all the hard things,” coach Paul Maurice said Thursday. “They are deep and they are good, and they’ve had a heck of a year, so it’ll be fun.”
With the Bruins coming off a historic regular season and the Panthers providing a talented foil, Boston-Florida will get high-profile billing, with the series set to kick off at Monday at TD Garden on Patriots’ Day — a big deal in Massachusetts.
Game 2 is set for Wednesday, again on the road. The rest of the series schedule will be announced after the conclusion of regular-season games Friday. Games 3 and 4 will be played at FLA Live Arena.
There’s another way to look at all this, too: If they are going to go on an unlikely run to a Cup, the Panthers would probably have to go through the Bruins at some point, so why not go for it right away? A first-round win followed by a second-round exit wouldn’t be any improvement on last year, but a historic upset could be a springboard for something bigger.
“We’re kind of going up against, well, let’s just say it for what it is: best team in regular-season history,” Tkachuk said. “We have a chance to do something very, very special, but it’s going to take a lot of preparation, a lot of execution.”
This story was originally published April 14, 2023 at 11:02 AM.
